How to run OpenAI Gym .render() over a server

Question

I am running a python 2.7 script on a p2.xlarge AWS server through Jupyter (Ubuntu 14.04). I would like to be able to render my simulations.

Minimal working example<

Answer 1

I encountered the same problem and stumbled upon the answers here. Mixing them helped me to solve the problem.

Here's a step by step solution:

Install the following:

apt-get install -y python-opengl xvfb

Start your jupyter notebook via the following command:

xvfb-run -s "-screen 0 1400x900x24" jupyter notebook

Inside the notebook:

import gym
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline

env = gym.make('MountainCar-v0') # insert your favorite environment
env.reset()
plt.imshow(env.render(mode='rgb_array')

Now you can put the same thing in a loop to render it multiple times.

from IPython import display

for _ in range(100):
    plt.imshow(env.render(mode='rgb_array'))
    display.display(plt.gcf())
    display.clear_output(wait=True)
    action = env.action_space.sample()
    env.step(action)

Hope this works for anyone else still facing an issue. Thanks to Andrews and Nathan for their answers.